Temporal transitions (short story)

Ada admired the silhouette of the city in the distance. The sun sat behind the skyscrapers, and she stood in their shadow, in the dark, looking through the windows of her empty office. She had been there for some time, still as a statue, acutely aware of each moment coming and going. Then finally, through the reflection in the window, she saw how the lights in the hallway behind her went on one by one, sensors triggered by movement. Underneath the flickering bulbs came Brian with long strides. As light filled the office, the view of the city faded, yielding place for her own image in the window, materialising as if from thin air with each lamp being lit.

Her pale, delicate features were framed by her dark hair which did not quite reach down to her shoulders. She was past forty now but if anything, age, and its entwined experiences, had awarded her the grace and composure which only complemented her attractive features. Her confidence, and competence, seemed to work like catnip on the male breed. As if by conquering her, men of less cerebral capacities could appropriate hers by mere association. After almost two decades in the field, she had grown a thick skin, but some things she could never get used to. Human nature, or at least one half of it, had slowly but steadily grown increasingly repulsive. Behind her own reflection in the window Brian approached, self-assured and smiling. She blinked a few times, ridding herself of the previous synapses and sentiments, and turned to face him with a scientific, emotionless, expression.

“Hi Ada,” he said, breaking the silence and looking her up and down in a way which would have been inappropriate during office hours. Actually, Ada thought, it was still very much inappropriate. “Hi Brian. How did it go? Any luck?” she inquired, avoiding his gaze. “I wouldn’t exactly call it luck,” he said, pulling himself up to his full height, “it was not an easy problem to solve but I showed it to some friends of mine at the research department and we worked it out together.” He crossed his arms. “It’s an interesting thought experiment but this has no real practical application, you know. What kind of a simulator is it you’re building again?” “It’s an educational physics software for graduate students. I need this proof for the extra credits bit. Are you sure you got it right?” “Shit, Ada. Have a look yourself. I’ve double checked it and it works out.” He took out a USB stick from his pocket and handed it to her, slowly. “So, you and me, dinner, ey? What about Friday?” She took the drive and pocketed it. “Sure, Friday works. Thank you, Brian.” And before she had soliloquised the last syllable, she reached for the laptop case on her desk, slung it over one shoulder and made for the exit without looking back. “I’ll call you tomorrow!” Brian shouted behind her as she left.

Outside the office, she headed to the nearby Marriot Hotel. A large sign on the building behind her said “MIT Dept. of Physics” and on the fourth floor a figure, stance wide, eyes wild, stood by the window, watching her go. There were three taxis waiting outside of the hotel and she jumped into the first one, directing the driver to take her even further away from the city. In the back seat, she opened her laptop and plugged the USB drive in as the driver ramped up the RPM’s on the highway ramp. Her heart raced as she ran the code. She gasped in the back seat when she realised he might actually have done it. Brian might actually have pulled it off. The son of a bitch. The son and grandson of someone. The grand-grandson of a bitch, she thought, running another advanced scenario on the back of the code to really make sure it worked. It did.

The car slowed to a halt outside of a large building complex with “24/7 Storage” written on the façade of the main building. She paid the driver in a commotion of currency, not waiting for the change, and ran, laptop in hand, into the maze of storage units. She soon found herself outside a familiar door. A door to somewhere else. To everywhere, anytime. The key turned and the wind blew the door open. Inside, she flipped a switch next to the door and the lights blinked into life, illuminating the small space which was about as large as her living room. But instead of furniture, the walls were lined with what at a first glance looked like dishwashing machines, and in the centre stood something even more imposing, reaching up all the way to the ceiling. When the lights came on fully, it looked like a giant stainless-steel refrigerator, large enough to contain a normal-sized refrigerator inside of it. The only difference, apart from the gigantic dimensions, was that it had a window, like a porthole, at about eye height, and that it was connected to the other machines via dozens of cables strewed on the ground. She nimbly stepped over the many cables and put her laptop down on a bench. She connected it and ran the code again. She jumped up and down in silent joy, arms flailing, smiling in a way she had not done in a long time. Grand-grandson of a bitch. Her mind started racing but she forced herself back into focus, to the task at hand, as the smile was replaced by an expression of intense concentration.

The cuboid machine was imposingly large but the welding seams were crude and it did not look very sturdy. It did not look like it could withstand a shake without breaking. But it had not been built for shaking, nor for breaking. Its purpose was entirely different. She knew it would do what it was intended for – she had designed it – and she knew that it would hold – she had tested it – and all that remained now was a very mathematical execution of her bold ambition. As long as it was airtight, everything would be all right. A quick there-and-back was all she wanted. She knew that for missions like this there should be multiple fail safes for each critical component, so that if one failed, she would not be left at the mercy of a slow and agonising death. But she trusted what she had built, fully aware that refining the hardware further required the collaboration of others. That refinement was only a question of engineering, and would come later, when the concept was proven and nobody else could take credit for her ground-breaking discovery. She was the tip of the spear. As such, a bit of bloodshed was something she could not afford to fear.

Of course she had gotten help, from Brian and others. They had contributed pieces of the puzzle. But the puzzle was designed by her, and nothing had come for free. She had been forced to attend dinners, to giggle and smile, and to put up with their penetrating stares and awkward approaches. But she had done so with a goal in mind, whilst ensuring none of them realised what the goal itself entailed. A decade of work, mingling with the largest minds and egos on this planet, was about to culminate in this room. She would manipulate the particles of which the world consisted in a pioneering and, perhaps, slightly mad, attempt at combining and practically applying theories from a wide range of scientific disciplines. And if she succeeded, no! – when she succeeded – it would all be worth it.

She began pacing the room, turning on the various machines lined up against the walls. After having done the full tour, and a humming sound had begun to fill the room, she walked over to her laptop, picked up a clipboard and ran a checklist of functions and equations too complex for a humble author to accurately recount in detail. Having stood so, mumbling to herself, ticking boxes off the checklist, biting her nails, she seemed at last content.

The cuboid in the centre of the room contained two chambers. She would be in the inner one. There she, Ada, would be safely retaining the integrity of her physical constitution, aging at the familiar tempo and in the familiar direction. In the outer chamber, she would bring tremendous violence to bear upon reality as we know it.

She went to the bathroom, dimly lit and dirty, on a corner in the labyrinth of storage units. As she washed her hands, she locked eyes with herself in the mirror. The two Ada’s held the stare, none of them flinching, and this is either where it begins, she thought, in this place of all, or this is where it ends. The Wright brothers would never have been known to history if they had not had the guts to pilot their own invention. Nor do Nobel prizes come easy, as Marie Curie’s radiation consumed carcass could attest to. Nothing worth doing is without risk. There are a million things which could go wrong, but that is true of anything. No, she said to herself, you have come this far. And history will prove you right, quite literally.

Back in the storage unit, the humming sound had risen to a pitch, and the room was warm. She consulted her laptop, and then stood back to inspect her inventions once more. She peered through the round glass windows of the outer and inner chambers. Lights were shining in the inner one, and she savoured a last moment of hesitation. A last moment of here-and-now. Then she pushed the lever upwards, which unlocked the door to both the outer and inner chamber at once. The doors slid open on heavy hinges. In the inner chamber there were lights blinking; an entire control panel with unmarked lights and buttons whose functions were known only to her, and by heart.

She stepped into the inner chamber, just large enough to stand in. She pulled both doors shut, felt the lever lock into place then pulled down on it to seal herself in. One of the lights went from blinking red to glowing green. Within seconds she began to sweat. There was no air supply in the inner chamber. She had about 5 minutes of air but that should be more than enough. She looked out the porthole window, condensing it with her breath as she prepared to leave Boston behind.

She pushed the blinking buttons on the control panel in a careful sequence, and they too stopped blinking one by one and instead omitted a steady Go!-glow. Getting ready to push the last one, she took one deep breath, then that was it.

The machines took two almost simultaneous snapshots of the particles in the outer chamber. The particles existed in more than one place at any given time, as Böhm’s theorem had established, and the two snapshots were so detailed that they each showed the particles in motion, with one foot in the past and one in the future. This allowed the determination of their direction and momentum of travel. Then the machines applied that logic in reverse, to extrapolate their historical trajectories. Next, instantly, commenced the novel part – the truly ground-breaking part – building on Marlan Scully’s theory of entangled photons. This enabled the machines to reverse the forward momentum of the particles to instead knock them back to their previous position, and then the position before that, and so on, almost ad infinitum. The inner chamber remained intact but the particles in the outer chamber were forced back an almost uncalculatable number of times to the positions they had held at the dawn of time.

She blinked and she missed it. In one moment she was in the familiar storage unit. In the next, she was somewhere, and sometime, else entirely.

All that she saw at first was that the lighting outside of the window had changed. The instruments pointed towards everything being in order, like she had never moved, except that the brightly lit storage unit had been swapped for something gloomier. She herself felt fine apart from a tremendous level of excitement and a slight pang of fear which she remembered to suppress. She straightened herself up to the porthole, peering out, forming a kind of binocular with her hands to shield her eyes from the lights within the chamber. As her pupils dilated, she began to make out the landscape outside. The sky was cloud-riddled and the sun was mere minutes away from having set completely. But in the dusk she could still make out the horizon. There was a row of cliffs, or perhaps a forest, far in the distance, rising like a dark wall from the plain in front. The plain itself was covered in lush vegetation, speckled with rocks or bushes which were too blurry in the twilight for her to make out in detail. She made a note to herself that she would have to come back in daytime once she had integrated photographic equipment into the hull of the machine.

She stood on her toes to inspect the environment just outside the capsule. There, hardly a meter away, rose a small pack of flowers, almost colourless on the dark plain but close enough for her to see that they looked like no other species she had ever known. The stalks were thin and leafless and veered in the invisible breeze. The flower itself was perhaps not a flower, but a fruit, the size of a plum, potentially reddish or purple. It was too dark to tell but it seemed heavy, due to the way it swayed, as if it contained pulp or seed capsules within. And this large fruit or flower seemed to daredevilishly defy gravity. It sat there, plump and heavy on top of a stalk which was disproportionally small and must be defyingly strong just in order to stay aloft. Perhaps the atmospheric pressure was different? No, it was not. She had sensors to detect that, lest a higher pressure coincidentally would crush her machine. But the pressure was the same, and the concentration of oxygen was also high enough, meaning that, in theory, she could even leave the capsule, and would be able to breathe out there. In theory. Right. Actually leaving the capsule was definitely not part of the protocol. It would just add another million things which could go wrong to the already impressive tally. The sensors might be wrong, the door might malfunction or, for all she knew, there could be congregation of carnivorous quadrupeds standing just behind the chamber, eager to taste human flesh as she proffered it. But hold up a minute. That line of thinking was not what got us this far. She built this thing, so the instruments would not be lying. The same goes for the door, and there was no data to support the hypothesis of the presence of woman-eating dinosaurs. Calm down. Picking the flower might actually mitigate some risks. It would serve as proof, and she would not have to come back again any time soon. She could bring it back, let them test and verify its authenticity and then, when there is no doubt about her being the first time traveller, the Vasco da Gama, the Marco Polo of the cosmos, the first discoverer of the entire world, predating the first men, predating Eden and Eve, then she could divulge the secrets of her creation. A blinking light announced she was running low on oxygen inside the chamber. She would have to go back very soon, or open the door, ventilate the chamber, and bring the plant back with her.

While one part of her, the careful part, the risk-averse part, still contemplated the risks, her hands, driven by fervent ambition, were already pushing the lever to open the door. Air escaped with a hissing sound from between the rubber lists that sealed the door. It swung open lazily and Ada was excited to the point of paralysis. Then she remembered to breathe. She filled her lungs and concluded that the sensors had been right, just as she had known, and that the pressure and oxygen concentration was adequate for her, Ada’s, survival. She cautiously stepped out of the chamber, placing one foot, then the other, on the moist moss-covered steppe floor. She approached the plant and cupped her hand under its fruit or flower. It was heavy and the stalk was indeed strong, almost like glass fibre, and..

Sharp pangs of pain shot out from her chest into her arms and legs. She grew dizzy and begun gasping for air, although it was abundant. Ancient bacteria, pure and potent, led to her kidneys, then her liver, shutting down. She fell, thinking of Columbus again, as her immune system failed at the onslaught of billions of microbes invading her bloodstream. Her heart rate slowed, then ceased. Her mouth kept slowly opening and closing, her last feeling one of quiet resignation, her last thought that one cannot think of everything alone. There she, Ada, died arduously, starring at the starry sky with empty eyes.